Did Mary Magdalene know the risen Jesus at once, or take him for the gardener?

On the harmony followed in these answers, the scenes are different meetings. When the women found the stone moved, Mary Magdalene ran back at once to tell Peter and John (John 20:1–2), so she was not with the others when the angel spoke to them. She came back to the tomb, stayed when the two disciples left, and it was there that Jesus appeared to her, alone; the longer ending of Mark (16:9–20), which the two oldest complete Greek manuscripts lack, says that he “appeared first to Mary Magdalene” (Mark 16:9). Matthew 28:9 describes Jesus meeting the other women. Matthew names Mary Magdalene among the women who set out (28:1), but he does not say she was still with them by then; and in many of the oldest manuscripts Matthew 28:9 lacks the words ‘as they went to tell his disciples’, so Matthew’s text does not say exactly when the meeting took place.

In John, Mary did not know Jesus at first: she was in tears, it was early, and she was looking for a dead body, not a living man. As soon as he said her name she knew him, and his next words, “Do not cling to Me” (John 20:17, BSB), suggest that she, like the women in Matthew, had taken hold of him or was about to. Luke 24:23 is the report of the two disciples who left for Emmaus later that day. They knew of the angels and the empty tomb; if Mary’s news had reached them, they, like the rest, had not believed it (Mark 16:11, in the longer ending).

One meeting told twice

Some harmonists think Matthew 28:9–10 and John 20:14–17 describe the same meeting, which Matthew summarises as an appearance to the women. On that view the holding of his feet in Matthew is the clinging that Jesus gently stops in John, and the accounts still agree: Mary did not know him at first, and then held on to him.